638 – Women’s History Month -The Secret History of Home Economics with Danielle Drelinger

Today on the podcast, we are joined by Danielle Dreilinger, author of the book The Secret History of Home Economics. Welcome, Danielle.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh my goodness, I was just sharing with her before we started that— and I have a piece of paper in my book, so I know that it was Melinda O'Hagan who told me about your book, July 14th, 2021. while I was on my book tour. She said, you must listen to this book, The Secret History of Home Economics. So I did. I've listened to it twice. I love this book. And as we started our Connections series this year on the podcast, I was like, oh my goodness, I really want to have Danielle on the podcast. She is a national rewrite editor for Gannett USA Today Network and the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home. and Changed the Way We Live, published by W.W. Norton. Danielle, thank you so much for joining us on the Organized 365 podcast. Can you please share with me why you decided to write the book The Secret History of Home Economics?

Certainly. Well, so it wasn't premeditated, if that makes any sense. So I was working in New Orleans covering education, and I was applying for a journalism fellowship that I knew would Give me the opportunity to start working on a book. So, and I mean, I'd always wanted to write a book. So I was thinking, but you know, the big question, right, is like, okay, what is the book going to be? And I even, I couldn't write a book about New Orleans education because that book, like the post-Katrina education book, had already been written by a, you know, reporter who had previously been in my job named Sarah Carr. So I thought, well, what, what should this book idea have? And I thought, well, it needs to be big enough to sustain a book. It should have something to do with education, because I cover education. I wanted it to have something to do with race, gender, and class, because it felt like otherwise it just wouldn't be relevant. History, because I read a ton of history. And the sort of X factor in it all was I— this journalism fellowship was at the University of Michigan, and they have a culinary collection in their library, and somebody at the fellowship had mentioned it to me, and I could just like see myself light up, right? So I thought, I want to use that collection. That would be neat. And also, I cook a lot, right? Like, these are things that interest me. And after a few weeks of just sort of keeping these parameters in my mind, I thought, Oh, home economics, the school class that used to teach girls how to cook. You know, perfect, fits everything. And my first thought was, you know, why isn't this back by now? Because I was thinking of all the trends of, you know, the preceding decade, right? Everything from craftivism and the revival of career tech education to, you know, Project Runway and like the DIY You know, mason jar aesthetic, right? And I really didn't know much about the subject. And when I— the very first thing I learned when I started researching the history is that one of the first— one of the founders of home economics was the first woman to go to MIT. And I just immediately knew from that moment, I was like, oh my, like my— it totally blew my mind, right? And I thought there must be so much here. That I don't know, that nobody knows. And it turned out, you know, to be true. And, you know, the funny postscript to this, you know, discovery story is it took me months, months on end to remember that my mother went to college for home economics and journalism. And she worked for General Foods when I was a kid and like, you know, worked on marketing campaigns for General Foods. Jell-O and Kool-Aid. And so I— but I just completely forgot until a few months in. I thought like, wow, the apple didn't fall far from, from that tree, huh?

Yes. So I mean, as I was reading this book, I got a Family and Consumer Sciences, so home economics degree from Miami University in 1994. So pretty recently. Yeah. And I actually went to New Orleans, I think it was 1992, as for a Family and Consumer Sciences conference. a home economics conference in New Orleans, which is interesting. But I'm a 4th generation female college graduate, and every single woman got a degree in a version of it that is represented in your book, a teaching degree, a home economics degree. It was the only thing that was allowed until my mom went to college and she got an art degree, but it was art education.

Right.

And it wasn't because they wanted to do those. Like, my great-grandmother got a teaching degree. She never taught. She didn't even like children, but that was the only thing she could get. And then she was like an entrepreneur. She owned her own businesses and things. I've already reviewed your book and my history in a different podcast, so we won't go there now. But yes, I remember getting my Family Consumer Sciences degree. We had a lab school. We learned about when they used to have actual babies in lab schools overnight. Like, it was just fascinating to read all of that in your book because it was like reading my own history of what I had learned.

Right. And of course, what you know from your, you know, from your history is that, you know, although the home economics college degree came to be disparaged in the '50s as like— in '60s, right— as like the MRS degree, right, for women.

Which I also got and loved, by the way. I'm so old-fashioned. I totally wanted to get married. I totally got an MRS degree.

Right. And, you know, the home economists of that time were very— but they thought it would be, you know, it's great for women to both be married and have children and have careers, which in the '50s and '60s was a fairly revolutionary idea. But yeah, before that, it had been one of the few college degrees that women could get, and they folded all sorts of stuff into those degrees, you know, business, electrical engineering, chemistry, right? But because these were the ways that they sort of snuck women into being able to study those subjects. Yes.

Yes. Okay. So before we get too far, one of the uniquenesses of the Organized 365 podcast is whenever we interview somebody, we find out who lives in their household with them. Just helps us situate them in the world. So if you wouldn't mind sharing with us who lives in your household with you.

Okay. So I am almost— how old am I? 47 years old. And I live by myself with my 2 cats who, you know, are entertaining and do not bring in any money. They are what Lillian Gil— what Lily Muller Gilbreth, a business consultant and erstwhile home economist, they're what she would describe as 100% parasites. But yeah, I'm, I, I have thought, I'm intrigued these days by a bunch of the writing that's come out about various, like, forms of households of people who love each other, but that go beyond just 2 people who are romantically involved. But yes, I moved in here at the tail end of cohabiting with, or cohabitating with a boyfriend, and that got very messy. And I thought, you know, I just want some peace. I just want peace in my home, and it has been delightful.

Well, thank you for sharing that. I definitely went to college to get an MRS degree and become a mother like that is all I ever wanted. Very, you know. not politically correct, I guess, but it's totally what I wanted. And we ended up adopting our 2 children in the end of my 20s. And I did teach for a few years, and then I was a stay-at-home mom. But I come from a long line of entrepreneurs, so I totally knew someday I would own my own business. And I'm in the process of getting my PhD.

Oh, congrats.

And I have to say, your book was part of why I decided to go ahead and go for it, because there's just so much research in there And so much knowledge. And like Lillian Gilbreth, as you mentioned. And I realized that when you write a book like you have or you're in the academic audience, the work that you do— Lillian Gilbreth's work has lived on way beyond her. But there are many authors of traditional books or companies like mine that help you get organized that literally all the ideas that I have will die with me because they're not in academia. And once they're in academia, they will live on. And what is interesting, and we're going to get into your book, but just so you know a little bit about me, As I've been studying this PhD, what I realize is most, almost all of the housework research that's been done in the last 40 years is through a feminist lens of men aren't doing enough in the household. So they only look at married couples, which as of today is only 29% of the US population, married couples with children, which means 71% of people are not represented in the studies.

Right.

You are not represented in the studies. I am no longer represented in the studies because my children are grown. So we would not be in the literature today. And so I think that we need to kind of go back to Lillian Gilbreth when she was a functional productivity expert.

Right.

And she was looking at how do we do less work and how do we do it more efficiently so we can do like she did, get a PhD and run a business and everything that she did. I could talk to you about The Secret History of Home Economics for days. And I encourage everyone to get at least one copy of the book. I have the physical book and the Audible copy of the book. And this is what got me really started in thinking about how can I take what I have learned in my business and make it bigger and bring the leadership aspect of women in the household back into the conversation? It's such a he said, she said conversation right now that if there's not a he in there, then the whole point is moot. And also, you know, the more I talk to women, they would like more help in the household if they are married.

Right.

But they don't want to give up their leadership role. They really don't want to, like, just give it all up. So I'm going to give an outline of kind of where our conversation is going to go. I'd like to touch on 3 concepts you present in the book in the rest of our interview. And of course, I'm fine to rabbit trail wherever you want to go. So one is the origins of housework pre-World Wars, especially how laundry was outsourced. I think that's so interesting. Next, the essential role home ec plays in the wars and the science of food especially, which, as you mentioned, is one of the reasons why you kind of got interested. And then the deliberateness in the 1950s of creating this stay-at-home housewife picture and what we now think of as a stay-at-home housewife. And I guess I'm tucking a 4th one in there. Lastly, I'd like to know how your book has been received and where you think we should go from here. So, number one.

Okay, great.

I did not know this, and I think it's relevant for our discussions. I was shocked to learn that during the Lake Placid conferences, discussions were already surrounding the idea that women did not want to do laundry and were encouraged to send it out.

So I could read your page if you want.

It's page 29. Um, because I just thought, oh my gosh, they were outsourcing all the way back then.

Oh yeah.

Um, so it says, there was nothing sentimental about washing clothes. They said, send it out to the laundry and improve training, working conditions, and sanitations for the professional laundresses because they wanted to be with their children and they wanted to be educating their children. So even they wanted to outsource this. This was 100 years ago. So what stood out to you as you researched housework in the late 1800s and the early 1900s?

Yeah, so I think what fascinated me was The, the role of changing technologies in and changing economies in what housework looked like and who did it. And this— I got a hint of this idea way on back, well before the book, when I read the book Never Done, which I'm sure you've read, by Susan Strasser, which is a history of housework. No, no, I gotta write it down.

It's so good. It's so good.

Okay. And You think about these households, you have to think about these households towards the end of the 19th century. So people, so many people didn't have running water.

Right.

Whether you were out in the country or you're living in a tenement apartment in a city with a whole lot of people in a small space, and they, for those people would have to go out downstairs to the courtyard to get their water from a pump. How are you doing laundry?

Outside.

Like, I mean, some people still had to do it at home, but there was a big business of sending your, your sending your laundry out the same way that there was business in buying food on the street. Or, I mean, it reminds me of like the, you know, in an earlier era in Europe when people didn't have ovens in their house and they would bring their bread loaves to a communal oven in Europe to bake them, right? People didn't have as much in their houses as we think they did. And laundry in particular was just an enormous, agonizing chore before the advent of automatic washing machines. And even like a wringer was an advance, right, to be able to wring some of the laundry out with a machine. So there's a reason that— I mean, housework was just so arduous. There's a reason why people had help. And there was this enormous industry of domestic labor, which in the South was enslaved labor, and in the North tended to be, you know, poor immigrants. Well, at the same time as the Civil War, you have the Industrial Revolution. So you no longer have the enslaved labor in the South. Up north, these women, young women who had been working, you know, in service, were working in factories, right? Where then they themselves were not keeping house in the same way that people like imagine. And so that's when you start getting the advent of things like cooking schools, which were part of the home economics movement. to teach these middle-class women who didn't have as much help anymore how to run a household, how to cook, how to— it was sort of what Julia Child later referred to as servantless American cooks. At the same time, you have technology coming into the house to make some of these tasks easier. So you have Ellen Swallow Richards, who was one of the founders of the field and the first woman to go to MIT. paid attention to, like, what is necessary to do in the house? Like, what is necessary for sanitation, really? Like, what's necessary to keep things clean and healthy? And anything else you want to do is a hobby. I feel like Casey Davis, you know, How to Keep House While Drowning— I feel like she's very much in that tradition of Forget about keeping up with the Joneses in terms of like having doilies on the back of your antimacassar or whatever, but Ellen tried out the new vacuum cleaner. She loved it. It was much better than carpet sweepers. She also thought you shouldn't have carpets at all because they just gathered dust and schmutz and they were harder to clean than floors, than hard, you know, wooden or plain floors. So They, you know, it's amazing when you think about it, right? This was an era where in order to cook something on the stove, you had to make a fire in a cast iron box. There were no thermostats on the oven. There was nothing regulating the heat. It was, you know, what were you putting into it? Were you in coal dust, kerosene grease, like all sorts of muckety muck that was getting over everything.

Mm-hmm.

And this was also, as Ellen pointed out, you know, all of the founding home economists were educators. Most of them came through women's colleges in one way or another, and they just felt like there were better things to do with your time than clean the house. So they focused on how— what are, you know, what's the efficient way to do this so that women can get done with it. and do something else, whether that's, you know, work for money or be with their kids or participate in public life or education. And at the same time, this field of home economics created a range of careers where women would be accepted because what they were doing was related, even if kind of tangentially, to these traditional household roles. So you have Margaret Murray Washington, who ran home economics and did a lot, great deal more at Tuskegee. You know, they had a program to train people to run laundries because this was a job that Black women were able to have post-Civil War. And, you know, it was, it was a job. It was something that you could do. It was a business that you could run.

You know, I was talking to Someone in a different PhD program, she's Black, and she said, I love— me and my fellow Black friends love watching the YouTube videos of white women about their housework. Because she said Black women have never had a choice. Like, this is like not even optional. Like, there's not— we don't have to be told how to— like, we just know how. We've always done housework. Housework has always been done. It's not like, oh, woe is me, I have to do housework. They're like, this is just like Table stakes, like you just do housework. And so there is such a— I love that you really pointed out we didn't have running water at home, how you would make— these are things I didn't even pick up as reading your book. Now I feel like I have to listen again. And we always have the bias of our today. We like think we could put that back 100 years in time. There is work. There is work that needs to be done. Visible work, invisible work, paid work, unpaid work. always has been, always will be in all industries everywhere.

Right.

The idea that work that is done at home, you know, is it work or is it a hobby? I love that you mentioned that. It's funny, there are a lot of things that I just say are taglines in our company that you're, you're saying. So our audience is going, oh, that's— Lisa says that. Oh, Lisa says that. The thing that I've been working on in my research practicum, and I'm trying to do it for my dissertation, we'll see. Is to create an operational definition of housework because there isn't one in academia. There might be one. I'm going to read these books that you told me about, but it's not— again, and this is a great example, we— you can say right here that we have these definitions of housework, but they're not in the academic literature. So you wouldn't believe how they're measuring housework, what is and isn't housework inside of academia. And in the last 40 years— That's really interesting.

I didn't think of that. Yeah.

In the last 40 years, all housework has been divided into 2 categories: female work and male work. And female work— oh, this is new.

Yay!

So female work is the routine work of cooking and cleaning and laundry, and male work is the occasional work of household maintenance, yard work, gardening, things like that. And my premise is that those are 2 completely different kinds of work. One is housework, which is cooking, cleaning, laundry. And the other one is the work of household ownership.

Oh, yeah.

And because, and because when we study married couples with children, they almost all are homeowners. They have homeownership work. And the original study from 1985, 335 of the 336 participants that they made the list of work from owned houses. So of course, cutting your grass is going to be work if you own your house. But if you rent, it's not work. And so I really want to create cleaner, clearer definitions so that when we go to do our research of that, we're comparing apples to apples. And in 2004, Bryan et al., which my audience has heard a million times, said that there is no operational definition of housework, and none of these studies can be compared or generalized because you're not really— what do you say housework is? So when you are talking about housework all the way back, You're talking about what I call housework, which are these essential tasks that happen from when you are born until you pass away. And my observation is when you're a child, somebody does them for you. And as you get older, someone does them for you again. But in your adult years, you do them for yourself, which is cooking, cleaning, laundry.

Or, you know, or you hire people to do them for you as well.

But they have to be done.

And they have to be done. Yeah. Yeah. They have to be done.

They are of the person. You have to do them.

And I should, I feel, you know, to clarify the Just in case this doesn't go without saying, you know, the early home economists didn't think there was anything like magical about women that meant that they could or should do these tasks. They just knew that these were the tasks that women and, you know, people of color had been doing, and they were looking to empower women from there, just very practically from where they were.

Yes.

But there's nothing inherently— like, they, they thought that boys should take home economics too. They thought everyone should know how to do household tasks. They thought that girls should take shop. You know, they, they just would— there isn't— these have become gender tasks, but there is really nothing inherent. You know, your uterus doesn't sweep the floor. Correct.

And to your point, there is a study that is done with Black boys, and they did not do gender. They didn't see tasks as male or female. When you do studies that have Black families, there is not this genderization that there is in white families, is what I found. However, it's really good for a man to get married because there are studies that show that when a man gets married, he loses 5.5 hours of housework per week, and when he gets divorced, he gains 5.3 hours of housework per week.

So I read this in Liz Lenz's book last year about her divorce. She has a whole lot of stats about uneven gendered labor divisions. And yes, you know, it's true. When I was living with a— when I was living with boyfriends, uh, there was more work and I did more of it. Yeah.

And, you know, we can— I don't want to argue about who's doing what and how it— like, I can't solve marriage problems. I can't solve, like, world peace and all these things. Um, but I do think it is interesting to understand it and recognize that that is an issue. But it doesn't answer the question for people who are not married, right, or are emerging adults or are widowed. Like, everybody has to do housework, so let's get back to the housework. Okay, so, right.

And again, the housework part, I think it's also interesting to, to, you know, along with this distinction you made, right, between like house maintenance and like the stuff you have to do day in, day out, it's also interesting to, you know, this home econ— one of the home economics perspectives which people don't think about. People— it, it goes against people's preconceived notions because people assume that home economics is, you know, tying ribbons on mason jars. But what is necessary and what is a hobby? What is not necessary? The same way that, like, organizing— organization works that way, right? Like, it's important.

Yep.

You have to be organized in a way that works for you or you're going to— things are going to be a little chaotic. But people also fetishize organization. Like, you don't actually need to buy out The Container Store. Correct. Great.

Although it is fun.

It is fun. It's fun. It can be fun. It can be really fun. But like, yeah, what's necessary and what's fun?

100%. Okay, so nobody wants to do laundry, basically. Now let's move on to the World Wars. I thought this was the most fascinating. And I, I knew about the Lake Placid Conference because I have a degree in Family and Consumer Sciences. And our family used to vacation at Chautauqua in New York, which is like a—

Oh, wow.

Yes, we used to go there every summer. Like, I'm from a long line of nerds. So my mom would take me there in the summer. And like, you can't even have a car there. So we'd have our bike, and I would go and I would take classes, and I would sing in the choir, and I would do the whole thing. So when you were writing about Chautauqua, I was like, oh my gosh, that is where I spent my summers. Because I'm a nerd. Which was great. I loved it. But I had no idea about the work that was done by home economists in the winning of the wars and the scientific rigor and just tease people with this and then they have to go get the book because there's so much in the book.

I will give a little piece of it and I am going to size up first just one thing in case people don't know this, the terminology that we're using here, right? So the field started, it was originally called things like domestic science, domestic economy. In the 1890s, a small group of women, women plus one man, got together at Lake Placid, New York, which was problematic, which is in the book. And they—

And the one man is interesting.

So who is that? Melville Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System.

Is that not amazing or what? Anyways, go on.

And they called— they renamed the field home economics in the hopes that that sounded more serious and academic, and it would— was a good name for a university course. Then about 100 years later, after home economics had gone into a long reputational decline, the people, the people in the field decided to rename it again, something that would be more scientific and, you know, more respect, and also to acknowledge the fact that they weren't just talking about jobs in the home. And they renamed it Usually called Family Consumer Sciences. It is, however, all the same thing.

Yes.

All right. So World Wars. So home economics really became popular and important during World War I, which is, you know, about 15, 20 years into its development. And then by the time World War II happened, it was Establish. I think I'm going to go with some of the World War II stories.

Okay.

So the dietetics, which is a subfield of home economics that, you know, now you can get just a separate degree in it, was recognized by the time before World War II as being just really crucial in winning the war in a whole bunch of ways. One is You need to feed soldiers. You need to feed soldiers. You need to feed injured soldiers. So even before, well before the US entered World War II, they were preparing for the likelihood that they would. And a bunch, they had home economists come in and rewrite the cookbooks for the armed forces. So for instance, the home economists at United Fruit took leave and she rewrote the Navy's cookbook so that they could feed soldiers. And then you also had dietitians who were working— a woman named Ruby Motley, whose story I found. She was working at Walter Reed before the war started, and she got herself shipped over to the Philippines, which ironically, before World War II, was like a pretty cushy assignment. with, you know, beautiful sparkling beaches. But then the war started. And she was working in tandem with nurses and doctors and medics to care for and feed soldiers who had been injured under really difficult circumstances, right? Like they're in— she would, you know, she— because she was out in the field with them. So they would have field hospitals. She would have, you know, flies buzzing around the water and, you know, just a few cans of food. And she was trying to keep these men nourished to help them heal. And then when the base in the Philippines— and she endured, you know, terrifying bombing with everybody else who was there. And then she was captured. And all of the soldiers were sent to one POW camp, but then she and like the other women were sent to— A different camp. to their own, like, prisoner of war camp for the rest of the war. And they were, you know, they were given rations, but the rations were pretty inadequate even to start with. And she and the other, a couple of other dietitians who were there organized a food system for the camp. And they started gardens and they started growing the plants that were there. They learned about, like, the local plants that were there that were nourishing and easy to grow. like, like a certain kind of like sweet potato that you grow for the leaves but not the root. And they would cook and provide food like to supplement these inadequate rations that they were getting from the Japanese. And, you know, she was in with a bunch of nurses. These were later known as the Angels of Bataan, if people may have read about them or heard about them. And so, yeah, she helped people survived because people were dying of starvation even as the camp was liberated by the Allies. You know, people were so scrawny. But, you know, without her work, even, you know, clearly even more would have died because they were being, you know, systematically starved. That is one of— let's see some of the other pieces. The Bureau of Home Economics. which was part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There is still a tiny little nutrition institute that is part of the USDA, which is what's left of the Bureau of Home Economics. But the Bureau of Home Economics put out radio shows and resources. Yeah, it was an extension project. And they put out tons of radio programs and pamphlets over the course of World War II, which they had already been doing, right? But they were sort of They redirected it towards war— people at home in wartime. So things like how to preserve and can vegetables so that you could send more to the front because, you know, how you could eat better under rationing. Like, it's great if you have a victory garden. Okay, now what are you going to do with it? The— they were very big on clothing. So they had, you know, here's how to cut down a man's coat. To make clothing for kids, you know. It was it was very much like a mend and make do attitude. And my favorite project that they did was a clothing design program because all of these women were now doing jobs that had been formed that they had not really been allowed to do before that had been men's jobs, right? So factory, lab work, farm work. You know, all sorts like hip mechanics, and what were they going to wear? And you know, women who had had these jobs, like farm workers, had. And one of the women involved in the project had grown up on a farm, and she was just. She said, you know, like I would just have like some old outfits that I would wear to do the work in the fields. But none of this was ideal, right? So they designed a series of clothing patterns that they. Sold through the— through sewing pattern companies, commercial sewing pattern companies that were jumpsuits and dresses and so on for women to wear while they were doing all these jobs. And they did like motion analyses, like, what are the motions that people are doing?

Like, yeah, for—

there was a— the factory worker jumpsuit had a belt, but it was like a snap-away belt so that if it got caught in a conveyor, it would just Come off and not drag you along with it. The, the farm work one, you had like adjustable length for the sleeves and the legs, so you could be cooler, you could be warmer, you could, you know, tie the ankles to keep dirt out. Yeah, and they had this, this fashion show that, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over to show off these work clothes for women.

So, so fascinating. And then the war ends and the men come home, right? And there's this distinct shift in the 1950s, and I just cannot believe how coordinated and orchestrated it was to both remove women from the workplace— that's one thing— but to completely rewrite the role of the homemaker, really.

Right. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and it was supposed to be like one— the '50s were supposed to be one chapter, and they ended up being like 4. Because I didn't want to say just like, oh, shrug, and then that thing happened after World War II where all the women went back to the house. I really was wanting to understand it. A bunch of different things happened. One is, of course, yeah, that women were just plain old fired.

Yeah.

Fired. Like, they— there, for instance, one of the wartime jobs for women, there were electrical engineers in home economics who had majored in something called household equipment, which was electrical engineering. It was just you were doing it with household appliances instead of, you know, commercial machines, and some of them were hired to work at places like Boeing. After men got drafted, and you know they were all kicked out. And part of it, you know, I was, I was struck by the difference in the textbooks and the curricula for home economics before and after World War II. One of the trends was the rise of child development as a field, which—

Yes.

There had already been childcare and child study in home economics, but now, like, pediatricians and psychologists got involved, and they were men, and they were bringing their biases into what they thought everything should— you know, how they thought this child development should go. And You know, home economics before them was really listed as like, okay, here's your curriculum. Here are these tasks that you need to learn how to do. Here's the science of egg whites. And, you know, again, it wasn't particularly gendered, really. Like, anybody could learn this, how to mop the floor. Anyone can learn the science of egg whites. The, the material after the war is much more gendered, and it starts to talk about how kids need their mother. Like one single, you know, one single, like kids need a daddy and a mommy and the mommy has to be there all the time. As opposed to what home economics had already discovered, which is that kids are fine in daycare. Like you don't need to be, you know, it was sort of attachment parenting writ large in some ways. Mm-hmm. You have the tasks and the demands being put on women in the home Going way up just at the time that technology has made it really much, much easier to do all of this work, right? Like electrification, even rural areas, which is something home economists worked on, was really improving. You had appliances, you had all of these, you know, labor-saving appliances, right? But then at the same time, the standards for what constituted a clean house went up.

Right.

You're suddenly expected to like mop your house every day or something truly ridiculous like that. And you suddenly— the mother is now responsible for the emotional development of the kids in the house. And people are writing about, you know, the interpersonal relationships, which, you know, great, interpersonal relationships are really important, but those are also something that is never done. Like, you are never done—

Right.

Dealing with other people. You could, you know, you can finish vacuuming, And you're done for, you know, until you need to vacuum again. So it was just really something to see all of this material in the textbooks that suddenly are talking about like daddy-daughter, you know, do an activity, have like a daddy-daughter fashion show, or, you know, weird things like that. The same Bureau of Home Economics, right, that had designed these work clothes for women was now designing the shopper's coat for women to like wear when they're going grocery shopping that like has a place to put your like bus fare and your like pencil for your shopping list, which was kind of depressing. So yeah, and even like the sewing patterns that were being put out to home economics teachers, right, went from being a range. So I, I write about this JCPenney, which had this whole home economics teacher training, like teacher materials and a magazine of sewing patterns, and the vision of young women's lives that they depicted pre-World War II, you know, they were doing a lot of different things. They were working around doing housework and going on dates, but they also were hanging out with their friends. There were graduation gowns, there were office clothes. They were closed during World War II to wear, you know, when you're working in the war effort. And then after World War II, it is all— I mean, it's like an Archie comic, right? It's like, oh, yes, little frilly, frilly things they'll love. So it's really dramatic to see the change.

It's so interesting because— so my great-grandmother got a degree in teaching. She owned a floral shop, a restaurant and a gift shop. My grandmother got a degree in home economics, which would have been before the '50s. So she got her degree in, you know, probably during the wartime or right as the war was ending. So it would have been a home economics degree. She went away to a college that you mentioned here in Missouri, um, Stephens College.

Oh, yeah.

That's where my grandmother went. We're from the Ohio area. So she went to that school, got a home economics degree, and she actually did start a company where they would mail from her basement, um, the fabric and the thread that you would need to do a pattern. So she had like all this thread in the basement, and they would cut how much thread you needed and then mail it to people. Was, uh, one of the businesses they had. They had many businesses, and she very much was an economist. Her husband was an accountant, and when he died of a massive heart attack when my mom was 21—

Yeah.

She kept doing the accounting. She just kept the business going. And they got remarried. Um, my mother got an art degree, as I mentioned. So I went to school, Miami University. I got a family and consumer sciences degree, and I did not realize this until you were talking right now. It was an early childhood degree. I mean, I went for an early childhood degree, but they called it family and consumer sciences, and there was not a lick of anything other than early childhood. It was 100%. Every single class I took was early childhood.

Interesting.

And education. I didn't have any. And I'm, I'm like, oh my gosh, I have a family and consumer sciences degree, which is only early childhood education. I live in Cincinnati. I went to Miami University. I'm from the Akron-Cleveland area. But the University of Cincinnati had the Artlett Center, which was one of the first daycare centers and training for early childhood all the way back, like in the '20s and '30s. And also they got a Rockefeller grant and they started training Black women in that school and they just didn't say anything about it so that they could do it because it wasn't something you could like do. I mean, Rockefeller was fine with it, but, you know, the world wasn't fine with it. So that's something that people don't realize, that Spelman grants were Rockefeller grants that primarily went to Black families or Black women who were going to school. So as you're saying this, I'm realizing I don't have a family consumer sciences degree at all. I have an early childhood degree, which brings me to another point that I wonder if you've found or thought anything about. As I'm now getting my PhD, I'm researching a lot more the early childhood developmental psychologists. Of course, you have Erik Erikson. Man, is he a funny guy! He totally rewrote his name. He has a Montessori degree. He doesn't even have a psychology degree, and he has all of the developmental psychology. He's like, I'll just do whatever I want, and like, we all follow him. There's Piaget, who I learned a lot about. But really, we don't have development beyond children. There aren't really adult development theories. Erickson has them into adult, but I have not. So I'm called— I keep saying on my podcast, no one's told me yet. Levinson has one, but it's really only 40 white Harvard guys that he researched, and they were all, you know, 50 and under. So how can you have an adult theory that only has half of the life's current lifespan? So I was wondering, you know, it really is— I got an early childhood developmental child psych child degree, and then I got an elementary degree on top of that. And now that you're talking, I'm realizing that even the degree that was offered that was called Family and Consumer Sciences wasn't by the time I got it in the '90s.

Yeah, well, what that speaks to, I think, is the atomization of the field. So The, the, the subdisciplines of home economics all became successful, and places broke off and started their own programs. So that might be, you know, fashion, nutrition, fashion design and merchandising, early childhood, hotel management. That was a home economics project. If people have ever heard about the Hotel Management School at Cornell, that is part of the human ecology College, which used to be the Home Economics College. And so most of the— one of the problems that the home economics field has had in the last 40 years has been the success of these subdisciplines. So people belong to the— gosh, I can't remember what the American Dietetics Association is called now. American Association of Nutrition Dietetics, maybe. They belong to that. They don't belong to AAFCS. The American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences.

Interesting.

And similarly, you know, when I went to Western Michigan University, because I was in—

I got—

I indeed got the journalism fellowship. So I was in Ann Arbor, and I drove across to Kalamazoo to see what their program was like. And, you know, even there, I was telling people, you know, from an outsider's point of view, it doesn't make a lot of sense why you have interior design and fashion and culinary and so on, like, in one group together.

Yeah.

And what— and in fact, some of the people, some of the students, some of the professors didn't get it either, right? The interior design people said, like, we don't really know why we are here. We are— most of what we do is commercial interior design, right? Like offices.

Yeah.

The fashion students were saying they wished they were part of the art school. But what people have told me is that they think that, you know, the mindset of Family Consumer Sciences/Home Economics is still valuable, and it is one that is more holistic. than any of these individual disciplines that, you know, takes a larger network of factors into play. And that, you know, when at its best, looks at both the macro and the micro, like the structural and the individual.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a very optimistic philosophy. I was asking, like, what's the difference between home economics and social work? And I was told, like, social work is fixing problems that have already happened, and home economics is trying to Build people up so those problems don't occur in the first place.

Interesting.

And, you know, it can be seen as just plain bootstrapping, or it can be seen as like, oh, like, let's look at the larger factors in society that cause poverty and like, let's combat poverty where it starts. Let's also teach people how to, you know, eat more affordably. So that, you know, they're— but yeah, it's like when you look, when you think about people who ideally, the early childhood students are also learning about other factors in families' lives that affect what happens with early childhood development. That all said, I, it is, it is something of a harder sell, especially because some of, I mean, and some of those parts are just Gone, never to come back, right? Hotel management is never going to become— be part of home economics again, or is marketing for that matter. There was a huge number of business home economists for decades, and this was— these were great jobs, and this is the job that my mother had. But that's before women could go to business school, and now they can go to business school.

You know, you are putting language to a lot of the concepts I've talked about and never been able to articulate. It's It's still fascinating to listen to you talk.

Oh, wow.

You've covered a lot of my— I love the whole book. You guys have to listen to the whole book. Some of my favorite parts are the things that really stood out to me that I wanted to hear you talk about. But I would love to give you some time to tell me what is a section of the book that you would like to dive deeper into that maybe really surprised you when you researched it, writing the book, or people might miss it the first 2 times they listen. So I need to know the 3rd time I listen.

You know what nobody ever asks me about, and I understand why not, because it's most of the way through the book and it's niche, and you have to be able— it kind of requires a certain amount of understanding of everything else that has happened, such as how home economics responded to second-wave feminism, which was with great enthusiasm, you know, enthusiastically embracing many of the concepts. And, you know, addressing things like divorced women who were, you know, left almost penniless because society doesn't respect work that isn't salaried, even though it is work. What no one asks about is the textbook trials in Alabama in the '80s. And I bring it up because I really feel like it is like enduringly relevant. So what happened, the, for, for those who may, those who weren't terribly conscious at the time, or, you know, alive at all.

Right.

The moral majority, the Christian right really rose in the early Reagan era in the early '80s. And it was a reaction in many ways to feminism and other like cultural liberation movements. and, you know, the, and, you know, bladed response to sort of just the '60s in general. And so it was, you know, people who were socially conservative and had, you know, a particular Christian worldview wanting to make this, wanting to have more people following their vision of the world. And they, in Alabama, in a particularly conservative Federal Judicial District, or actually, sorry, it was state. It must have been state, state judicial district. The Moral Majority sued about to block a number of textbooks, and including among them were home economics textbooks, and they argued that they unconstitutionally promoted religion, and the religion was secular humanism. And, you know, this idea, you know, moral relativity. And because these books were talking not just about how to, you know, mend your clothes, but, you know, what are your values? What do you think about issues in the world? Like, this was, you know, had gone— was like talking about all this like interpersonal '70s stuff, to lack of a better word. And they certainly were saying things like, talk to your parents. What does your religious leader think? They weren't saying like, don't listen to grown-ups, but they certainly also weren't saying the Christian way is— this is the right way to, to go about everything. And so they— the one of the authors for one of these textbooks, who is a grandma who lived in Texas, Like, came in to testify about her own, you know, she was like, I'm a woman of faith and I wrote this book. I think people should talk about issues that matter to them. Why are you putting this book on trial? And the thing is, and the Homak books lost. The Homak textbooks were ruled unconstitutional for promoting the religion of secular humanism, and they were removed from schools. And then, you know, very not long afterwards, the decision was reversed on appeal. But some of the teachers didn't know that it had been reversed. They didn't necessarily get the books back. And there was a survey that found that, you know, really had a chilling effect for home economics teachers about what they were comfortable talking about and what they thought they might get in trouble for. And it, you know, it just It's— it feels really relevant to me in our, you know, current era, right, where there are other— I mean, fights over curriculum have always happened and they'll never probably stop, but where you hear people, you know, teachers worrying about chilling effects on what they teach and what they talk about.

Yeah, and I think that you see that throughout the whole book, you know, the how some— a few big companies can change the narrative in the '50s. You know, a few people during the— women during the war in home economics can change the outcome of the war based on nutrition by going at it from a nutrition angle. Like, it is often a small group of people that really believe in what they're doing and are willing to keep going are able to change the narrative or the world or the rules for many. It just happens over and over and over again. So yeah, thank you for, for pointing that out. I would love to know, how has this book been received?

It's been received— it's interesting. So pardon me, so Malcolm, Malcolm the brown tabby is coming up to say hi. You're very cute.

The—

I mean, first of all, a bunch of people have read it, which is great. Yeah, towards in the end, I write about how to bring home economics back, which I did purely because every normal— like everybody I talked to who wasn't in the field, right? The whole years I was writing this book, I'd said I was writing this book about home economics and people would say, oh, what happened to that? We should bring that back. We should bring that back because kids don't know how to deal with their finances, or they throw their pants away because if a button comes off, or this— kids these days, there's a lot of kids these days. But genuinely saying these are useful, the life skills part of it are useful skills that everyone ought to know. And I would say the, you know, people are interested in the history, and that is great. I do not see— I was expecting— and people who work in home economics or home economics adjacent fields, right, have been— who are maybe— well, the ones who talk to me are like, we should do things differently, right? We need to shake things up. I, for instance, recommend that they change the name back to home economics because nobody knows what family and consumer sciences is.

Right.

Like the number of times I have been like by somebody next to somebody at, say, a conference, and the bartender at the hotel bar says, oh, what are you here for? And I say, oh, we're here for a conference for teachers of family consumer sciences. And the bartender says, what's that? And they say, well, it used to be home economics. Like I could have titled the book— It used to be. It used to— I could have titled the book, it used to be home economics.

Yeah, right.

So those people are all really excited, and they're excited about ideas of, you know, just continuing to emphasize the macro connected to the micro vision and this holistic vision of, of the field. I have been surprised that the waning establishment has— like, I really did think that AAFCS would be like, we should change the name back to home economics, what a great idea, which they did not. But I also, you know, I also myself don't— like, I don't have a dog in the fight of who teaches these skills or where people learn them. And certainly there is an enormous number of resources and ways that people learn these skills that— and, you know, enter these careers that are not part of the traditional home economics field, like Emily Oster's book, The Family Firm, is very much in the tradition of Lillian Muller Gilbreth's, like, bringing business thinking to the household. And people read that, right? So I myself, you know, I mostly just wanted people to learn the history. And I've been excited about the renewal of knowledge of Margaret Murray Washington from Tuskegee, who was like the number one person I really, really wanted to highlight. Because she was— I mean, when she died 100 years ago, she was one of the most famous Black women in the world, and, you know, then she was completely forgotten. So yeah, it has been exciting. It's been exciting to bring recognition to some of these, you know, great figures.

So, uh, just to close this out, I'm looking for what theory I'm going to use for my dissertation, and when you look at the Thanks. If you think of any, anybody, anybody, feel free to email me if you think of any. And so when I look at the theories that are utilized in housework research, economics theory goes back to the 1800s and is consistent all the way through. The economic theory goes all the way through. There was the productivity and organization theory with Lillian Gilbreth, started 1800s, and it really phased out about the '50s and '60s and then was picked up by multiple feminist theories and also theories of power, like who's in power and people who aren't in power are doing more work and things like that. But when you talk about home economics and you talk about economic theory, what I have been saying lately is that the household manager is responsible for 68% of the US GDP. So household spending is 68% of the US GDP. Taken that way, the head of the household is the largest by money small business in the world.

Hmm.

And so we all are home economists, every single one of us that have our own households, especially in the United States. You are, you are what moves the entire United States, which moves the entire world. It is our power of the purse that does everything. And so while you can say that the work that we do at home is unpaid labor, truly, you could, you could say, you know, people in all kinds of organizations, you know, CEOs get paid to be a CEO, but they, they aren't trading their time for dollars. They aren't like doing the service that their company offers that is bringing in the money. They're being strategic about the direction of the company. And so in that way, I'm trying to have us all realize that we are all home economists. We, we are responsible for the largest pot of money there is in the world. And the more that we can be efficient and productive and proactive in our homes, the further our money can go, and we can use our time for what we're uniquely gifted and created to do. And we can bring other things to the marketplace that we can be paid for, or can just be a contribution to society that we couldn't have done if we were just too busy. You know, ironing our linens or things, these made-up things that we think we need to do in our households. So when you look at it that way, we're all home economists.

Hmm. Hmm. That is interesting. And what I immediately start thinking about is, and this is not necessarily gonna help you come up with a theory, but one of the tensions in home economics was thrift versus consumption. And, you know, you had from 1920 or so onward, you had home economists working for corporations that, you know, Betty Crocker was run by a team of home economists.

Yeah.

And, you know, wanted— and they saw themselves as being consumer representatives and consumer educators, but they also were being paid by people who—

Marketers.

Whose goal was, goal was to sell a product. You know, you mop your floor more times a week, you're buying more Mr. Clean.

Yeah, I live in Cincinnati, Procter& Gamble headquarters. I'm well aware of everything that's being sold to consumers.

Right, right. So, but at the same time, you had people who were working on thrift and consuming less, which continues to be, you know, a thrust in home economics today. And so, you know, it's sort of a piece of that larger economic question of if we have an economy that's based on consumption, what happens when we are saying, wait, we need to be consuming less for the planet and, you know, for less—

So consuming less physical things, but not necessarily— maybe you're consuming more courses, more audiobooks, more content, more knowledge. Like, we're all going to consume things, right? And we are all minimalist in some areas and maximalist in other areas. So I like to say, whatever your passion project is, like, buy all of it, have all of it, get all the containers that organize that. But then be minimalist in everything else that is not your passion. You don't have to be maximalist in every single thing. And in that way, you balance your own home economy.

That makes sense. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Yeah. Oh my goodness, Danielle, thank you so much for our conversation today. It was a pleasure talking to you. And everyone needs to go get a book of The Secret History of Home Economics. It is a fascinating read about our history. Like, this is the history really of women, but also of all of us that have households. You have an economy, and this is ways in which it can contribute to the larger story and also be part of your smaller story. Danielle, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much for having me.